by Flann O'Brien
Synopsis: The basic idea is that a young guy, down on his luck in rural Ireland, one night aids and abets another guy in killing and robbing a rich old dude. They hide the money in a box at the old guy’s house and come back 3 months later to collect it and weird stuff happens. The main character is confronted by the old guy he helped kill and then he goes to a police station and has nonsensical conversations with two policemen there for the remaining 3/4 of the book. The first bit was OK, but the conversations with the police were terrible to read, just silly, absurd dialogue that makes no sense. It was so tedious that I found myself just skimming the last 100 pages. Apparently, the big concept is that the main character was dead the whole time and this is his hell, his punishment for his part in the murder – to sit through an eternity of irrational discussions with ridiculous policemen.
How it relates to Lost: In Season 2, Desmond is reading this when the hatch is infiltrated by the crash survivors. While Lost writers indicate this book is highly important, I found very few explicit links between the two. The only clear item is that when the main character recovers the money box he hid, it doesn’t contain money, but a mysterious substance ‘omnium’, which can transform into whatever one desires. Similar concepts are spoken of between Ben and Locke in “The Man from Tallahassee”. Also, in the book, the policemen are constantly taking readings from an underground bunker (not really explained any more than that) and having to adjust those readings into a safe range – the third policeman is secretly modifying the readings to unsafe ranges just to screw around with the other policemen. This kind of sounds like the hatch and the counter. The scene where the main character confronts the old man he killed was very reminiscient of Locke’s encounter with Jacob. I really didn’t find anything enlightening here and it wasn’t a good read either.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Friday, July 4, 2008
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Synopsis: The Brothers K is one of the greatest novels ever written and it is also a thousand pages long. There is a lot to the plot and subplots, but here are the basics. It is about four brothers who share the same father but different mothers. Their father is truly a despicable man – he regularly beat and then ultimately abandoned each of the mothers, he tries to steal the fiancé of his eldest son, he sired the fourth son by raping a demented homeless woman. The father ends up murdered, with each of the brothers guilty to different degrees. During the course of the investigation and trial, each of the brothers shows signs of being just like their father.
How it relates to Lost: Ben is given The Brothers K to read while he is held prisoner in the hatch and he has an extended conversation about Dostoevsky with Locke, so it has obvious significance. Just about every character on Lost has daddy issues, which is the theme of the book. Many of the characters are even responsible for their fathers’ deaths. There are many similarities between Christian Shepherd and the father of the Karamazov boys – they are both drunkards and the show implies that Christian tries to steal his son’s wife (S3 opener). The deeper subject of the book is that many of the characters are struggling with issues of faith vs. reason, free will vs. destiny, making it incredibly relevant to the show.
Synopsis: The Brothers K is one of the greatest novels ever written and it is also a thousand pages long. There is a lot to the plot and subplots, but here are the basics. It is about four brothers who share the same father but different mothers. Their father is truly a despicable man – he regularly beat and then ultimately abandoned each of the mothers, he tries to steal the fiancé of his eldest son, he sired the fourth son by raping a demented homeless woman. The father ends up murdered, with each of the brothers guilty to different degrees. During the course of the investigation and trial, each of the brothers shows signs of being just like their father.
How it relates to Lost: Ben is given The Brothers K to read while he is held prisoner in the hatch and he has an extended conversation about Dostoevsky with Locke, so it has obvious significance. Just about every character on Lost has daddy issues, which is the theme of the book. Many of the characters are even responsible for their fathers’ deaths. There are many similarities between Christian Shepherd and the father of the Karamazov boys – they are both drunkards and the show implies that Christian tries to steal his son’s wife (S3 opener). The deeper subject of the book is that many of the characters are struggling with issues of faith vs. reason, free will vs. destiny, making it incredibly relevant to the show.
JACOB'S HANDS
by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood
Synopsis: Jacob’s Hands is about a simple ranch worker out West that discovers he has the ability to heal animals with his hands. He then heals the crippled daughter of his employer and ends up running off to Los Angeles with her. She becomes a nightclub singer while Jacob gets set up with a hustler who exploits his healing powers for loads of money. Then, Jacob and his girl are taken in by an immensely rich but sickly young man named Earl, who hires Jacob to stay with him and keep him healthy. Earl ends up stealing Jacob’s girl and then dying and Jacob moves back out to a ranch in the desert.
How it relates to Lost: While not specifically mentioned on the show, other books by Huxley are, and this book has been mentioned in various discussions of Lost on the web. Jacob’s Hands seems relevant in light of all the healing that occurs on the island, especially because the main character is named Jacob. The underlying theme of the book is the healing of souls, not just the physical body. Jacob encourages people to free themselves from the unhappiness in their lives, the misery that we sometimes hold on to and let define us. A key phrase in the book is “Let go”, echoing Christian Shepherd’s words in the Season 3 opener as he tells Jack over and over to “Let it go”. In the epilogue, we see Jacob doing his healing at a shack in the desert, similar to the faith healer Rose and Bernard visit in the Australian desert.
Synopsis: Jacob’s Hands is about a simple ranch worker out West that discovers he has the ability to heal animals with his hands. He then heals the crippled daughter of his employer and ends up running off to Los Angeles with her. She becomes a nightclub singer while Jacob gets set up with a hustler who exploits his healing powers for loads of money. Then, Jacob and his girl are taken in by an immensely rich but sickly young man named Earl, who hires Jacob to stay with him and keep him healthy. Earl ends up stealing Jacob’s girl and then dying and Jacob moves back out to a ranch in the desert.
How it relates to Lost: While not specifically mentioned on the show, other books by Huxley are, and this book has been mentioned in various discussions of Lost on the web. Jacob’s Hands seems relevant in light of all the healing that occurs on the island, especially because the main character is named Jacob. The underlying theme of the book is the healing of souls, not just the physical body. Jacob encourages people to free themselves from the unhappiness in their lives, the misery that we sometimes hold on to and let define us. A key phrase in the book is “Let go”, echoing Christian Shepherd’s words in the Season 3 opener as he tells Jack over and over to “Let it go”. In the epilogue, we see Jacob doing his healing at a shack in the desert, similar to the faith healer Rose and Bernard visit in the Australian desert.
THE INVENTION OF MOREL
by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Synopsis: A fugitive (we never learn his name or his crime) is hiding out on a deserted island in the Pacific. Everyone avoids the island because of rumors of a terrible disease there that has killed entire ship crews in the past. The fugitive explores the island and discovers that someone was on the island before him and built a chapel and a large building he calls ‘the museum’ (more like a hotel), but these buildings are abandoned. Inside the museum, he finds a storeroom with food, a library, a record player and record collection. In the basement are motors generating electricity for the building, apparently powered by a water mill elsewhere on the island.
Then, the fugitive is forced to hide out in the woods because a group of ‘tourists’ arrives. Strange things are going on – the fugitive spies on the tourists for several days and watches as they seemingly appear in rooms out of thin air, but they apparently cannot see him. The fugitive falls in love with a woman among the group, Faustine, but of course, she cannot see him. A freighter arrives to take the ‘tourists’ back after a week. The night before they leave, the fugitive witnesses a confession to the group by their leader, Morel. Apparently, he has tricked everyone; he is an inventor who has developed a machine to record everyone on the island, but not just their image - his machine records all of their sensory experiences, their memories, etc. and can play back a realistic holographic projection that has a consciousness of its own. His purpose in doing this is to give all of his friends immortality through the recording. As long as the machines operate, their week on the island will be projected in an endless loop. Once the tourists leave, their recording starts playing again from the beginning.
The fugitive experiments with Morel’s machines, making a recording of his arm and playing this image back, but afterwards, his arm starts to decompose in reality. It is the same with anything else he records (plants, insects, frogs – they all rot, die). The fugitive discovers that Morel created the rumors of disease to protect the island, and even staged the wreckage of the freighter and his/his friends bodies to reinforce this rumor, as they all undoubtedly rotted and died after being recorded. The fugitive records himself for a week with the projection of the tourists, pretending he is Faustine’s lover, so that he will be projected for eternity with her.
How it relates to Lost: Appeared in S4 “Eggtown” episode. I believe this to be the single most important source of material for Lost that I have encountered so far. In addition to the similarities mentioned in the synopsis, the fugitive hears echoes of whispering and footsteps in the buildings (the whispering in the jungle on Lost), the leader of the tourists wears a fake beard for a while, the layout of the basement described by the fugitive is strikingly similar to the blast door map. As he tries to figure out what is going on, the fugitive explores a number of possibilities that have all been addressed on Lost as potential explanations;
• He is really dead, the tourists can’t see him because he is a ghost (ala The Turn of the Screw by Henry James which also appears on Lost and was adapted into the movie "The Others")
• He is really on a boat at sea and this is all a dying hallucination
• In reality, he is locked away in an insane asylum and this is his delusion
• P.52 “this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people”
In this book, the key theme is immortality, something frequently suggested on Lost. The fugitive spends his days writing a book about immortality – he wonders what does the body matter if we can make our consciousness immortal?
Synopsis: A fugitive (we never learn his name or his crime) is hiding out on a deserted island in the Pacific. Everyone avoids the island because of rumors of a terrible disease there that has killed entire ship crews in the past. The fugitive explores the island and discovers that someone was on the island before him and built a chapel and a large building he calls ‘the museum’ (more like a hotel), but these buildings are abandoned. Inside the museum, he finds a storeroom with food, a library, a record player and record collection. In the basement are motors generating electricity for the building, apparently powered by a water mill elsewhere on the island.
Then, the fugitive is forced to hide out in the woods because a group of ‘tourists’ arrives. Strange things are going on – the fugitive spies on the tourists for several days and watches as they seemingly appear in rooms out of thin air, but they apparently cannot see him. The fugitive falls in love with a woman among the group, Faustine, but of course, she cannot see him. A freighter arrives to take the ‘tourists’ back after a week. The night before they leave, the fugitive witnesses a confession to the group by their leader, Morel. Apparently, he has tricked everyone; he is an inventor who has developed a machine to record everyone on the island, but not just their image - his machine records all of their sensory experiences, their memories, etc. and can play back a realistic holographic projection that has a consciousness of its own. His purpose in doing this is to give all of his friends immortality through the recording. As long as the machines operate, their week on the island will be projected in an endless loop. Once the tourists leave, their recording starts playing again from the beginning.
The fugitive experiments with Morel’s machines, making a recording of his arm and playing this image back, but afterwards, his arm starts to decompose in reality. It is the same with anything else he records (plants, insects, frogs – they all rot, die). The fugitive discovers that Morel created the rumors of disease to protect the island, and even staged the wreckage of the freighter and his/his friends bodies to reinforce this rumor, as they all undoubtedly rotted and died after being recorded. The fugitive records himself for a week with the projection of the tourists, pretending he is Faustine’s lover, so that he will be projected for eternity with her.
How it relates to Lost: Appeared in S4 “Eggtown” episode. I believe this to be the single most important source of material for Lost that I have encountered so far. In addition to the similarities mentioned in the synopsis, the fugitive hears echoes of whispering and footsteps in the buildings (the whispering in the jungle on Lost), the leader of the tourists wears a fake beard for a while, the layout of the basement described by the fugitive is strikingly similar to the blast door map. As he tries to figure out what is going on, the fugitive explores a number of possibilities that have all been addressed on Lost as potential explanations;
• He is really dead, the tourists can’t see him because he is a ghost (ala The Turn of the Screw by Henry James which also appears on Lost and was adapted into the movie "The Others")
• He is really on a boat at sea and this is all a dying hallucination
• In reality, he is locked away in an insane asylum and this is his delusion
• P.52 “this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people”
In this book, the key theme is immortality, something frequently suggested on Lost. The fugitive spends his days writing a book about immortality – he wonders what does the body matter if we can make our consciousness immortal?
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